A Not Linked Page Question

[JonsonSwartz]

Hello,

I have a page for opening an account in my website, this page is not accessible from my website menu, the only way to reach this page if you have the URL, I send the URL for specific users I want them to open an account in my system.

I have two questions regarding this:

• does this harm or cause damages to my website SEO ?
• blocking this page in Robots.txt will cause any issue/will help ?

waiting for your answer.
Thanks in advance,
Joni.

[dotfly]

there is no "good" reason why you should not keep that url private - it won`t do your site any harm according to SEO aspects...

I would recommend you to set that url to "noindex" and "nofollow" BUT this might not work if Google already crawled and indexed your site / this specific URL.... as long as you dont overdo "noindex" & "nofollow" this wont get you into serious trouble...

[SEM-Freak]

You can request removal via WMT if the URL is no index.

And as above no harm having island pages... in fact it is best practice for PPC so you get message match from ads to landing pages.

[Reinhart]

The two previous answers on this question have it right, I believe.

There's no harm in leaving the page available for Google to crawl and decide whether it wants to index/rank it or not.  If it's something that has been outranking another page of yours unintentionally you can noindex it, nofollow links to it, request its removal from the index and throw the relative URL into your robots.txt.  Pretty extreme if you ask me but if it's somehow ranking above a desired page that would be my move.

But to answer your question: no a single page in the index that isn't particularly useful isn't a problem.  Sites have privacy policies, about pages, and other non-essential resources all the time and Google knows this.  No big deal.  If you had hundreds of useless pages on your site that you didn't want indexed I'd recommend noindexing the lot of them.  But sounds like we're talking about a single page.

It won't ultimately hurt or help you to do any of the above unless, as I said the page is causing you issues in other ways (though it probably isnt).

Hope that helps.

Jacob @ Distilled